The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance
A reply by the Catholic archbishop of Westminster to W. E. Gladstone’s attack on the decrees of the First Vatican Council. Its second chapter reviews the rival interpretations of Unam sanctam and argues for one of them.
Manning wrote in the controversy that followed the definition of papal infallibility in 1870. Gladstone had argued that the council made Catholics’ civil loyalty uncertain, and pointed to the medieval popes’ claims over kings. Manning answers that Unam sanctam claims for the pope a spiritual power, which touches temporal rulers only indirectly, where their acts bear on sin and salvation.
He is cited in this wiki as a witness to the debate, since he sets out the positions he opposes: the reading of the French royal lawyers in 1302, that the pope claimed to be the king’s superior in temporal things, and the view he attributes to Bossuet, that the bull made that claim and was withdrawn by Clement V. His own reading is that of one party among Catholic theologians, stated by an archbishop in a polemical work.
Cited in
- 18 November 1302, firm date